What role can research play in helping the criminal justice field be more thoughtful about failure?
It’s a tough slog to introduce more evaluation into the field. When you look at fields like medicine and engineering with a different cultural tradition, the contrast to criminal justice is easy to see. If an intervention reduced breast cancer by 30 percent, it would quickly become mandated practice, and conversely, if there was a practice that hurt people, it would be discontinued. I can’t say the same thing about criminal justice. How does that change? We should be following the maxim that no experiment can be tried without being evaluated. That’s particularly true for the federal government. It should fund experiments before it funds programs and make sure that they are evaluated rigorously. Have you experienced professional failures? In the 1980s, I ran a victim services project at the Vera Institute. We had a $1 million grant to increase attendance in court and encourage victim participation. We did a lot of things but found that our efforts had no effect on participation rates. T
